I'm currently behind the curve and am level 21 and never before in any previous wipe have I been so consistently headshot by other players, currently over 75% of my deaths are all due to some variation of a headshot despite wearing level 3-4 helmets every raid. I load into every raid with a sick feeling that I'm going to get one tapped and am never disappointed as it happens an unbelievable amount of times. I felt somewhat biased as I typically play solo and somehow thought to myself that I was overexaggerating this phenomenon but after playing with my buddies they are in disbelief how commonly I am one tapped out of most fights.
At worst I'm able to trade with another player as we at least both have the opportunity to mag dump each other and without fail I'm promptly shot somewhere in the head. Getting tapped out of sight without ever seeing the shooter is fairly common as well but it feels more frustrating to lose an actual gun fight because I know they're getting aim punched yet still manage to hit the head every time.
Coincidentally almost every gunfight I happen to lose are exclusively to players with better ammo than what's currently available to me, this is despite me occasionally getting the opener on them and landing my shots. Tracking my deaths I've lost every single gunfight to players with M856A1 while the largest portion of my deaths are due to 7.62×51 which seems to be by far the most common round players are running that I die to.
Is it really a case of players being so good at the game that headshots are so easily landed even while being aim punched after being opened on? I fail to grasp how I can die so much to headshots while despite my best effort at aiming for the head I frequently find myself mag dumping my target and sometimes having to reload to finish them. Many of my gunfights that don't delete me with a headshot are the mag dump back and forths which are almost always players with equal ammo types as myself which usually is .45 FMJ, 5.45 PP or lower, 7.62 PS, etc.
As much as I would like to blame my immediate headshot deaths to cheats I'm well aware that it's just not the case but I have no idea what the current state of hacking is in Tarkov. It's definitely still around and I saw Landmark get run down by a blatant hacker full autoing a AKM with 7.62 PS yesterday which simply leaves the question of any potential one tap being non legitimate.
At this point I can easily say that this game has caused a lingering feeling of PTSD before, after, and during playing like no other game ever has which is due to some weird sense of helplessness that no matter how much game knowledge or performance I excel at that I still always end up losing gun fights and my progress is stagnated and I become more and more demotivated to load up another raid.
